IPCC

An audit of the HadCRUT4 dataset, the primary global temperature database used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found multiple errors.

HadCRUT4 is also the dataset at the center of “ClimateGate” from 2009, managed by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University.

The paper, An Audit of the Creation and Content of the HadCRUT4 Temperature Dataset by John McLean (PhD), was first published as a PhD thesis and now as a book. Get the book for $8 here. Read the original thesis here (free download).

The audit found more than 70 areas of concern about data quality and accuracy.

Australian researcher John McLean says that HadCRUT4 is far too sloppy to be taken seriously even by climate scientists, let alone a body as influential as the IPCC or by the governments of the world.

Main points:

The Hadley data is one of the most cited, most important databases for climate modeling, and thus for policies involving billions of dollars.

McLean found freakishly improbable data, and systematic adjustment errors, large gaps where there is no data, location errors, Fahrenheit temperatures reported as Celsius, and spelling errors.

[The improper transposition of Fahrenheit temperatures to Celsius is serious. Fahrenheit 40 is a cool temperature but Celsius 40 is equivalent to 104 Fahrenheit. This erroneous transposition is real “man-made global warming.”]

Almost no quality control checks have been done: outliers that are obvious mistakes have not been corrected. For instance, one town in Columbia spent three months in 1978 at an average daily temperature of over 80 degrees C (176 F). One town in Romania stepped out from summer in 1953 straight into a month of Spring at minus 46°C. These are supposedly “average” temperatures for a full month at a time. St Kitts, a Caribbean island, was recorded at 0°C for a whole month, and twice!

Temperatures for the entire Southern Hemisphere in 1850 and for the next three years are calculated from just one site in Indonesia and some random ships.

Sea surface temperatures represent 70% of the Earth’s surface, but some measurements come from ships which are logged at locations 100km inland. Others are in harbors which are hardly representative of the open ocean.

When a thermometer is relocated to a new site, the adjustment assumes that the old site was always built up and “heated” by concrete and buildings. In reality, the artificial warming probably crept in slowly. By correcting for buildings that likely didn’t exist in 1880, old records are artificially cooled. Adjustments for a few site changes can create a whole century of artificial warming trends.

Details of the worst outliers:

For April, June and July of 1978 Apto Uto, Colombia had an average monthly temperature of 81.5°C, 83.4°C and 83.4°C respectively. (178 to 182 Fahrenheit)

The monthly mean temperature in September 1953 at Paltinis, Romania is reported as -46.4 °C (in other years the September average was about 11.5°C).

At Golden Rock Airport, on the island of St Kitts in the Caribbean, mean monthly temperatures for December in 1981 and 1984 are reported as 0.0°C. But from 1971 to 1990 the average in all the other years was 26.0°C.

Bad data and bad modeling assumptions make IPCC temperature simulations diverge widely from really. That’s why we should not believe the IPCC when they cry “wolf” and say it’s the end of the world unless we give them billions of dollars and get rid of fossil fuels.

The primary conclusion of the audit (as noted by Anthony Watts) is that the dataset shows exaggerated warming and that global averages are far less certain than have been claimed.

One implication of the audit is that climate models have been tuned to match incorrect data, which would render incorrect their predictions of future temperatures and estimates of the human influence of temperatures.

Another implication is that the proposal that the Paris Climate Agreement adopt 1850-1899 averages as “indicative” of pre-industrial temperatures is fatally flawed. During that period global coverage is low – it averages 30% across that time – and many land-based temperatures are very likely to be excessively adjusted and therefore incorrect.

Why is it that a PhD student working from home can find mistakes that the British Met Office, a £226 million institute with 2,100 employees, could not. Significantly, the Met Office, in a statement, said they do not disagree with any of his claims.

Maybe, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in his farewell address:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Here is another collection of recent articles that show the madness and stupidity of global warming hype. I lead off by reporting that my own Congressman, “Rowl” Grijalva, wants to ban politically incorrect books:

Democrats Ask Teachers To Destroy Books Written By ‘Climate Deniers’

by Andrew Follett, Daily Caller

Three senior House Democrats asked U.S. teachers to destroy a book written by climate scientists challenging the environmentalist view of global warming.

The Democrats were responding to a campaign by the conservative Heartland Institute that is sending copies of the 2015 book, “Why Climate Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to about 200,000 science teachers. Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott of the Committee on Education, Raúl M. Grijalva of the Committee on Natural Resources, and Eddie Bernice Johnson of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology all issued a statement telling teachers to trash the book. Read more (You can download the book for free here.)

From the alternative universe of California:

California doubles down on stupid

by Anthony Watts

From the LA Times and the “let’s double down on stupid” department:

A cornerstone of California’s battle against climate change was upheld by a state appeals court that ruled the cap-and-trade program does not constitute an unconstitutional tax, as some business groups had claimed.

The 2-1 decision from the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento does not eliminate all the legal and political questions that have dogged the program, which requires companies to buy permits to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

But environmental advocates dismayed by President Trump’s decision to roll back federal regulations in Washington were buoyed by the victory, which preserves the only program of its kind in the country. Read more

A coalition of states filed a legal challenge against the Trump administration’s decision to roll back a slew of Obama-era climate regulations.

The legal motion comes after Trump signed an executive order targeting climate change regulations ushered in by former President Barack Obama. The New York-led group of states argue Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has a legal obligation to regulate emissions some climate scientists believe contribute to global warming. Read more

Reigning in politically incorrect ceiling fans:

Dems, Enviros Sue To Force Trump To Issue More Regs On Household Appliances

by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller

Democratic attorneys general and environmentalists are suing the Trump administration for delaying the implementation of federal energy efficiency regulations for household appliances and other equipment.

Republicans have long been critical of Energy Department efficiency regulations, and many economists have argued such rules don’t make much of a difference on overall energy consumption. Efficiency regulations also increase appliance prices, but proponents argue the increased up front cost is more than outweighed by increased energy savings over time. DOE’s ceiling fan rule is expected to cost $4.4 billion. Read more

A supervisor at the Energy Department’s international climate office told staff this week not to use the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction” or “Paris Agreement” in written memos, briefings or other written communication. Setting aside the fact that it is truly idiotic for the Department of Energy to even have an office, department or bureau with the word “climate” in its name… The irony here is priceless. (Read more)

The state of academia:

The carbon footprint of crime has fallen, study finds

by Anthony Watts

A study led by an Engineering Doctorate student at the University of Surrey has found that the carbon footprint of crime over the last 20 years has fallen.

The study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, applied estimates of the carbon footprint of criminal offences to police-recorded crime and self-reported victimization survey data, to estimate the carbon footprint of crime in England and Wales between 1995 and 2015. (Read more) It’s nice that criminals are being more politically correct.

Former chief scientist Sir David King admitted he was wrong in advising the U.K. government to encourage diesel vehicles to fight global warming.

King said the government overestimated the effectiveness of its programs to encourage diesel vehicles. King was the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007 and until recently a special representative for climate change.

King advised the U.K. government to push programs to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and concluded that switch to diesel cars would be better for the environment.

Though well-meaning, the continent’s environmental efforts haven’t decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and have raised power prices. Many of Europe’s anti-global warming policies have actually made the situation worse. Read more

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther King Jr

“The curse of man, and cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.” –H. L. Mencken

This book by climate scientists Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer is a tour-de-force on the scientific debate about global warming. The book is relatively short, just 101 pages divided into seven chapters. Each chapter leads off with a summary of key findings, and each chapter section is supported by many references to the scientific literature.

The book is published by the Heartland Institute. You can download the entire book as a PDF file (7.8Mb) for free here, or buy a hard copy from the Heartland Store ($14.95).

Many books and papers about global warming contain many, sometimes confusing, graphs. Not this one. Some readers may be happy to know that there are only three graphs in the whole book. The authors get right to the point with their succinct, easy-to-read explanations.

Here is a brief summary, key findings of each chapter, and my comments:

Chapter 1: No Consensus:

“The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a ‘scientific consensus’ in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.”

This chapter examines each major paper that claims consensus and exposes its flaws. This chapter also provides evidence for lack of consensus.

“Climate is an interdisciplinary subject requiring insights from many fields. Very few scholars have mastery of more than one or two of these disciplines.”

“Fundamental uncertainties arise from insufficient observational evidence, disagreements over how to interpret data, and how to set the parameters of models.”

“The United Nations’ Intergovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created to find and disseminate research finding a human impact on global climate, is not a credible source. It is agenda-driven, a political rather than scientific body, and some allege it is corrupt.”

“Climate scientists, like all humans, can be biased. Origins of bias include careerism, grant-seeking, political views, and confirmation bias.”

Chapter 3: Scientific method versus Political science:

In this chapter the authors contrast the proper methods of scientific investigation with what goes on in climate science.

“The hypothesis implicit in all IPCC writings, though rarely explicitly stated, is that dangerous global warming is resulting, or will result, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

“The null hypothesis is that currently observed changes in global climate indices and the physical environment, as well as current changes in animal and plant characteristics, are the result of natural variability.” (The IPCC has never presented any physical evidence to refute the null hypothesis.)

“In contradiction of the scientific method, IPCC assumes its implicit hypothesis is correct and that its only duty is to collect evidence and make plausible arguments in the hypothesis’s favor.”

Chapter 4: Flawed Projections:

This chapter examines the climate modeling used by the IPCC and shows how all their predictions (projections) have been wrong.

Chapter 5: False Postulates:

This chapter shows that modern warming is neither unprecedented nor unnatural. Rather, the following statements are supported by observation evidence.

“Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth century surface warming (1979–2000) lay outside normal natural variability.”

“The late twentieth century warm peak was of no greater magnitude than previous peaks caused entirely by natural forcings and feedbacks.”

“Historically, increases in atmospheric CO2 followed increases in temperature, they did not precede them. Therefore, CO2 levels could not have forced temperatures to rise.”

“Solar forcings are not too small to explain twentieth century warming. In fact, their effect could be equal to or greater than the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

“A warming of 2°C or more during the twenty-first century would probably not be harmful, on balance, because many areas of the world would benefit from or adjust to climate change.”

Chapter 6: Unreliable Circumstantial Evidence:

This chapter debunks scary climate claims.

Chapter 7: Policy Implications:

The authors recommend: “Rather than rely exclusively on IPCC for scientific advice,
policymakers should seek out advice from independent, non-government organizations and scientists who are free of financial and political conflicts of interest.”
“Rather than invest scarce world resources in a quixotic campaign based on politicized and unreliable science, world leaders would do well to turn their attention to the real problems their people and their planet face.”

The book concludes with this:

Policymakers should resist pressure from lobby groups to silence scientists who question the authority of IPCC to claim to speak for “climate science.”

The distinguished British biologist Conrad Waddington wrote in 1941,

“It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to be true, or what one may hope to be true.” (Waddington, 1941).

This prescient statement merits careful examination by those who continue to assert the fashionable belief, in the face of strong empirical evidence to the contrary, that human CO2 emissions are going to cause dangerous global warming.

I highly recommend this book for those who want to know the real story of global warming, and I recommend it especially for those who believe the IPCC and government propaganda.

It’s about the money, and power, not the climate. According to a press release from the United Nations Regional Information Center, Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said that “the fight against climate change is a process and that the necessary transformation of the world economy will not be decided at one conference or in one agreement.”

Figueres went on to say, “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history….This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

That “economic development system” Figueres talks about is capitalism. The UN is attempting to transform that to global socialism governed by the United Nations.

In a previous article (Enviros are watermelons) (see here also) I noted that the conclusion of a meeting of environmental groups last year in Venezuela proclaimed “we must end capitalism to save the world from global warming. The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system.”

In a series of conferences over the past few years, the UN has been trying to get signatories to a legally binding treaty on climate change in which countries promise to decrease carbon dioxide emissions and western countries agree to pay huge sums to developing countries (through the sticky fingers of UN officials) to save those developing countries from the imagined ravages of global warming.

“Figueres, however, pointed out that the legal treaty is only one of four important parts of the process. In addition to the treaty, there are the current Climate Change actions from now and until 2020, the financing packages and the so-called Intended National Determined Contributions (INDCs). These are the actions that countries intend to take under a global agreement from 2020 and have to be publicly outlined… It is expected that all major economies will deliver their plans in time: the US, China, and the European Union have already shown their cards.”

Figueres praised President Obama’s stance on climate change and Obama’s gift of $3 billion to the UN Climate Fund.

“Capitalism has been the primary economic model of the west since the industrial revolution. Therefore, the only logical conclusion, based on her [Figueres] stated objective, is the eradication of capitalism and free market economics, to be replaced with a model based on monetary redistribution. This we know by the redistribution calculations being developed by the UN’s IPCC for developed nations to pay ‘reparations’ and ‘carbon offsets’ to poorer countries based on carbon dioxide emissions.”

This goal of economic transformation is hardly a secret. Back in 2010, Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III, explicitly affirmed the economic objective:“Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection…One must say clearly that we redistribute the world’s wealth by climate policy…”

WSJ: “It would appear that the entrenched prevalent ideology of the UN has found a new way to fundamentally transform the world with the visage of Marx.”

The IPCC claims that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar must become 80% of the power sector by 2050 or the world will face “severe, pervasive and irreversible damage.” The IPCC also says that fossil-fuel power generation without carbon capture and storage technology must be “phased out almost entirely by 2100.” Welcome to the stone age.

In five major reports since 1990, the IPCC has published thousands of pages of material, none of which provide any physical or observational evidence that our carbon dioxide emissions have a significant effect on global temperature. All their dire predictions are based on “garbage-in-garbage-out” computer modeling.

As reported by Pierre Gosselin at the NoTricksZone, the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) concludes that the IPCC report is fraught with error and distortion. “Not only does it contain major contradictions, simplifications and even falsehoods with respect to the earlier comprehensive partial reports, it is a stark contradiction to almost every measurement and trend in nature.”

Another NoTricksZone post features an article from Der Spiegel science reporter Axel Bojanowski which documents examples of IPCC factual suppression and how the UN body made glaring contradictions:

The first concerns the subject of species extinction. In the 2013 IPCC main report, no predictions were made on to what extent species were threatened, demonstrating that too little is known to make reliable forecasts. But the latest synthesis report claims species have already began dying off due to climate change.

Bojanowski also points out that the latest synthesis report writes of numerous species having been forced to relocate because of climate change. But the main 2013 report writes: “There’s very little confidence in the conclusion that already some species may have gone extinct due to climate change.”

Another misleading claim by the new synthesis report is that today’s climate change is happening faster than at any time from natural causes over the last 1 million years – thus stressing out species. But learned-geologist Bojanowski cites the main IPCC report’s real findings:

At the end of the ice age, as the first part of the UN climate report shows, in large parts of the world climate fluctuations of 10°C in 50 years, i.e. 20 times faster than in the 20th century, took place and large climate-caused species extinctions are not documented.”

Capture of the U.S. Senate in the recent election does not bode well for the IPCC. Not only is it unlikely that a Republican senate would ratify a reincarnated Kyoto-like treaty, but U.S. funding for the IPCC may be cut off.

As reported in UN Tribune: “The current Senate bill on funding for state and foreign operations includes $11,700,000 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The bill was approved by the current Democrat-controlled sub-committee in June but has yet to be put to a full vote. However, the House version of the bill passed by a Republican-controlled sub-committee, also in June, states that ‘none of the funds in this Act may be made available for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change/United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.’” That almost $12 million is about one-third of the IPCC budget.

The IPCC released their “synthesis report” today. The long awaited conclusion to their massive multi-hundred billion dollar industry’s belief that they need to keep getting paid. I have listed the authors from the front page. Take a few minutes and look up some of the names on this list, copy their resume’s into the comments below. Anecdotes are appreciated. My contention is that AGW is an industry, alarm is their product, their personal pay depends on more study and extreme conclusions. Without yet checking, I believe that nobody on this list is conservative or moderate politically and the message is uniformly more government, more tax and more study.

The Obama administration has recently claimed that climate change “once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present” and “climate-related changes are outside of recent experience.” President Obama was referring to extreme weather events and claims that recent extreme weather is unprecedented.

Alan Caruba comments “Even though President Obama continues to lie about ‘climate change’ and employs the many elements of the federal government to repeat those lies, this huge hoax is dying…The White House recently released its latest ‘National Climate Assessment.’ It is 841 pages of outlandish claims that reflect the lies generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When you consider that the federal government spends an estimated $2.6 billion annually in grants for climate research, about the only beneficiaries are those ‘scientists’ employed to further the hoax.”

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a coalition of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and The Heartland Institute has just released its new volume of real climate science that opposes the science fiction of the UN’s IPCC. The documents can be obtained from the NIPCC main website: http://climatechangereconsidered.org/

Later this month, NIPCC will publish another volume concerning human welfare, energy, and policies.

Below are very brief summaries of these two volumes, physical science and biological impacts taken from the Summary for Policy Makers:

Physical Science Summary

• Global climate models are unable to make accurate projections of climate even 10 years ahead, let alone the 100-year period that has been adopted by policy planners. The output of such models should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation.

• Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth century surface warming (1979–2000) lay outside the range of normal natural variability, nor were they in any way unusual compared to earlier episodes in Earth’s climatic history.

• Solar forcing of temperature change is likely more important than is currently recognized.

• No unambiguous evidence exists of dangerous interference in the global climate caused by human-related CO2 emissions. In particular, the cryosphere is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; and no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events.

• Any human global climate signal is so small as to be nearly indiscernible against the background variability of the natural climate system. Climate change is always occurring.

• A phase of temperature stasis or cooling has succeeded the mild warming of the twentieth century. Similar periods of warming and cooling due to natural variability are certain to occur in the future irrespective of human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Biological Impacts Summary

• Atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a non-toxic, non-irritating, and natural component of the atmosphere. Long-term CO2 enrichment studies confirm the findings of shorter-term experiments, demonstrating numerous growth-enhancing, water-conserving, and stress-alleviating effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 on plants growing in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

• The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth. All across the planet, the historical increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration has stimulated vegetative productivity. This observed stimulation, or greening of the Earth, has occurred in spite of many real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation, including fires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climatic change.

• There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Farmers and others who depend on rural livelihoods for income are benefitting from rising agricultural productivity throughout the world, including in parts of Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most critical. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels play a key role in the realization of such benefits.

• Terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Empirical data pertaining to numerous animal species, including amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, reptiles, and mammals, indicate global warming and its myriad ecological effects tend to foster the expansion and proliferation of animal habitats, ranges, and populations, or otherwise have no observable impacts one way or the other. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.

• Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life. Many aquatic species have shown considerable tolerance to temperatures and CO2 values predicted for the next few centuries, and many have demonstrated a likelihood of positive responses in empirical studies. Any projected adverse impacts of rising temperatures or declining seawater and freshwater pH levels (“acidification”) will be largely mitigated through phenotypic adaptation or evolution during the many decades to centuries it is expected to take for pH levels to fall.

• A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world.

The London Telegraph claims to be in possession of a leaked UN IPCC report which says in effect that growing crops to make “green” biofuel [ethanol and biodiesel] harms the environment and drives up food prices.” See Telegraph story here. The UN will publish the report on March 31. It will be interesting to see if the final version is the same as the “leaked” version. If so, then the story will represent a reversal of UN “scientific consensus” on biofuels.

The Telegraph story says “that biofuels, rather than combating the effects of global warming, could make them worse.”

As I noted in an ADI story last November, “…the ethanol era has proved far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today…As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies…Five million acres set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite national parks combined — have vanished on Obama’s watch.” The biofuels industry is heavily subsidized and about 40 percent of U.S. corn crop goes to produce ethanol rather than being used as food.

In a Telegraph story published last December, The Great Biofuels Scandal, Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, wrote, “The biofuel story is a perfect example of good intentions leading to terrible outcomes. Moreover, it is a lesson on how powerful, pseudo-green vested interests can sustain a bad policy. Hopefully, it will also be a story of how reason can prevail in the divisive climate debate.”

The Telegraph notes, “Studies show that as land is dedicated to energy crops, land for food is simply taken from other areas – often forests – leading to substantial CO2 emissions. And processing biofuels emits CO2, drastically reducing benefits.”

It was an interesting coincidence of reporting contrasting two takes on global warming.

The Independent from Britain had an “Official Prophecy of Doom” where they claimed to have read a leaked copy of an up-coming report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which, according to the story, predicted “Climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century, increasing the risk of violent conflict and wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy…” and “the report predicts that climate change will reduce median crop yields by 2 per cent per decade for the rest of the century – at a time of rapidly growing demand for food.”

In contrast, an editorial from the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: “Needing More Food, but Biting the Hand that Feeds Us” notes that UN policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions goes directly against efforts to produce more food for a growing population.

That is because carbon dioxide is plant food. CO2Science.org provides their Plant Growth Database, a listing of the experimental findings of the vast collection of scientific papers that show that increased carbon dioxide is good for food production. They document that “enriching the air with CO2 almost always leads to significant increases in the photosynthetic rates and biomass production of all of the world’s major food crops. And as for the highly-unlikely increase in global temperature that the world’s climate alarmists predict to result from projected increases in the air’s CO2 content, there are also many studies that reveal the positive consequences of warming for agriculture in Earth’s cooler high-latitude regions…”

Also, there is “the significant body of work that reveals that as the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration rises, the various temperatures at which different plants photosynthesize most proficiently rise right along with it” as they described well over a decade ago in a report entitled “The Spector of Species Extinction: Will Global Warming Decimate Earth’s Biosphere?”.

The Independent article invokes the “consensus” argument say that the UN report was“ put together by hundreds of respected scientists.” Well, we’ve seen how poorly the UN climate models work when compared with reality:

The UN IPCC is a political organization not a scientific one. Their entire existence depends upon presenting scary scenarios.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be
led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L.
Mencken

Scientists Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, S. Fred Singer, and Willie Soon have released a lengthy critique of the recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

They note that “the IPCC has retreated from at least 11 alarmist claims promulgated in its previous reports or by scientists prominently associated with the IPCC. The SPM also contains at least 13 misleading or untrue statements, and 11 further statements that are phrased in such a way that they mislead readers or misrepresent important aspects of the science.”

You can download the 18-page critique here. Below I summarize some alarmist claims that the IPCC has retreated from or downplayed.

The IPCC finally concedes that there has been a 15-year “pause” in global warming in spite of carbon dioxide increasing by 7 percent. The IPCC also concedes that the rate of global warming has decelerated since 1951 although carbon dioxide has increased 26 percent since that time.

The “hockey stick” has disappeared. The IPCC now admits there was a Medieval Warm Period that was just as warm as late 20th Century temperatures.

In a contradiction to its own climate models, the IPCC now admits that Antarctic sea ice has been increasing by 1- to 2 percent per decade since 1979.

The IPCC admits that its climate models did not predict nor can they reproduce the recent lack of warming.

For the first time, the IPCC admits that solar factors may play a determinative role in short-term climate variability.

The IPCC has decreased the lower number in the range for equilibrium climate sensitivity, i.e., the amount of warming they expect to result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2. However, unlike in previous reports, the IPCC did not publish a “best guess” of what the actual number is. The lower value brings the sensitivity closer to what has been estimated by many non-IPCC scientists.

The IPCC now has “low confidence” that global warming will result in dangerous increases in the magnitude or frequency of extreme climatic events including cyclones and droughts.

As I’ve shown in a previous post, the IPCC does not now think that warming will release carbon dioxide from permafrost nor do they think that there will be a catastrophic release of methane from clathrates in the ocean.

Post navigation

Note to readers

Check out the ARTICLE INDEX to find more than 1000 articles on Natural History of the Sonoran Desert, Geology, Energy, Climate Change and more.
If the "see also" links at the end of older posts don’t work, just copy and paste the title into the search box.
The ADI INDEX are my articles published in the Arizona Daily Independent.
The CLIMATE IN PERSPECTIVE page is a long essay debunking climate myths with observational science.
The "EDIBLE DESERT PLANTS" page is an index to my articles on edible and medicinal plants of the Sonoran Desert.
My wife writes murder mysteries: check out Lonni's Murder mystery page.
The banner photo is part of the view from my back porch.

Article Categories

Wryheat by Jonathan DuHamel provides education and commentary about geology, natural history of the Sonoran desert, climate and energy issues and politics that affect those areas. Re-posting is permitted provided that credit of authorship is given with a link back to the source. Contact: wryheat (at) cox.net
Comments should be civil and to the point; otherwise they may be deleted.